The museum scene gets nasty.
BLOODY GOOD
Istvan Kantor gained notoriety in 1988 after being arrested at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for spraying an X of his own blood on the museum wall between two Picassos. Some drops got on a Picasso, and Kantor was charged with vandalism. “Inevitably some blood will always go on the [other] works,” Kantor is quoted as saying. The Blood Campaign started, says Kantor, to fund neoism, his multimedia performance art movement of rebellion, innovation, and experimentation. Said Kantor, “It was all about the idea, how art is serving society.”
Though he was banned 1991 from the National Gallery of Canada for a blood “gift” and booted from the Art Gallery of Toronto in 2006 for performing in the nude with computer parts clipped to his privates in front of an Andy Warhol work, Kantor had found support in 1985 in Montreal: after he splattered an X of his blood on the museum wall Musee d’Art Contemporain the director told Kantor if he’d been notified beforehand, he would have scheduled an official performance.
In 2004, the Kantor—amid controversy—won a top prize in the Canadian art world, the $12,000 The Governor General’s Award in Media and Video.
TRITE FIGHT
Toronto’s multimedia performance artist Jubal Brown won fame in 1996 protesting “oppressively trite and painfully banal” art. Executing his planned Responding to Art triptych, Brown threw up in blue all over Mondrian’s Composition in Red, White and Blue at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. The blue was a combination of blue cake icing, blueberry yogurt and blue Jell-O. “I don’t hate Mondrian,” Brown said to the New York Times reporter. “I picked him because he’s such a pristine symbol of Modernism.” Six months earlier, the 22-year old art student vomited in red all over Dufy’s Harbor at Le Havre at the Art Gallery of Ontario, because it “was just so boring it needed some color.” The third piece of the triptych, vomit in yellow, never materialized, perhaps because museum officials were planning to file charges for vandalism.
The most “dislikes” for a Canadian video on YouTube goes to Justin Bieber’s “Baby” with more than three million and counting.